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What Is the Common Thread of Creativity? Its
Dialectical Relation to Intelligence and Wisdom by
Robert J. Sternberg In particular, intelligence forms the thesis
of such a dialectic. Intelligence largely is used to advance existing
societal agendas. Creativity forms the antithesis of the
dialectic, questioning and often opposing societal agendas, as well as
proposing new ones. Wisdom forms the synthesis of the dialectic,
balancing the old with the new. Wise people recognize the need to balance
intelligence with creativity to achieve both stability and change
within a societal context. Yet I
argue that one common thread emerges. That common thread is the role of
creativity in the dialectical progression of ideas. The basic idea
underlying this article is that all cultures—including the cultures
that comprise fields of knowledge—generate a dialectical process
(Hegel, 1807/1931) in which intelligence represents a thesis,
creativity an antithesis, and wisdom a synthesis. Intelligent
people are those who somehow acquire the skills that lead to their
fitting into existing environments. Some theorists believe that such
skills are relatively domain-general (see, e.g., Carroll, 1993; Jensen,
1998; see also essays in Sternberg & Grigorenko, in press), whereas
others believe that they are relatively domain-specific (see, e.g.,
Ceci, 1996; Gardner, 1983, 1999; see also essays in Sternberg &
Grigorenko, in press). Still
others believe that such skills have both domain-specific and
domain-general properties (see, e.g., Sternberg, 1997a, 1999d). But
these diverse views have in common the proposition that the skills
constituting intelligence lead people, on average, to be rewarded in
terms of whatever the reward structure of a society is. What
is considered intelligent in one place may not be in another, as
cultural psychologists have appreciated in their studies of
intelligence (see, e.g., Serpell, 2000). Intelligent people are
rewarded, on average, precisely because they adapt and often can adapt
in multiple environments. People
easily can make the step from the existence of this reward system to
the justification of the reward system (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994).
However,
it is important to realize that it is no coincidence that this system
exists: Societies define intelligence largely on the basis of
individual differences to account for the fact that some people are
more successful than others in school, in life, or elsewhere. As
McNemar (1964) pointed out, a concept of intelligence, at least in the
sense of what has been measured by psychometric tests of intelligence,
might never have arisen in the absence of individual differences. Experimental
psychologists historically have been less interested in intelligence
than have been differential psychologists, perhaps in part because of
the former's lesser interest in individual differences. Products
fashioned by intelligent people are high in quality but not necessarily
novel. Creativity thus seems in some way to go beyond This
view implies that creativity is always a person-system interaction:
Creativity is meaningful only in the context of a system that judges
it, and what is creative in one context may not be in another
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Hence,
creativity must be viewed as a property of an individual as that
individual interacts with one or more systems. For
example, painters who originated the idea of painting Cubist paintings,
such as Picasso or Braque, were highly creative in a given time and a
given place but might be viewed as less creative today because such an
idea is no longer particularly novel. Consider
the individuals whose contributions are reviewed in this special
section. Some
of Pauling's other ideas, such as with regard to the structure of DNA
(a triple helix) and with regard to the value of Vitamin C in fighting
colds, also were crowd-defying, but the ideas were simply wrong, and
hence their novelty was not matched by their quality, with the result
that they had a short half-life. Charles
Darwin's evolutionary proposal turned on their head not only many
scientific ideas but also many religious ideas (see Gruber &
Wallace, 2001, this issue). As a result, Darwin was vilified by many
during his lifetime, and he continues to be vilified today by certain
religious and other ideological groups. Thomas
Young's theory of light as a wave was so controversial that, from the
standpoint of the physics of 1910, it might be viewed as a "negative
contribution" (see Martindale, 2001, this issue). Yet
later it would be recognized that this prickly idea was in large part
correct because light has properties both of a wave and of a particle.
Amabile (2001, this issue) noted how the fiction of John Irving has
been described as " 'wildly inventive' " and as " 'bearing little
similarity to other recent fiction' " (p. 334). Finally,
in helping formulate Impressionism, Claude Monet changed what were the
current constraints of the domain of painting by imposing his own novel
ones, for example, in dealing with "how light breaks up on things" (see
Stokes, 2001, p. 357, this issue). Many
contemporaries are not thrilled to hear that not only their work but
also the assumptions on which their work is based are being questioned
(Kuhn, 1970). The creative people are correct: Time and again, their
work and even they are attacked. What
these individuals may fail to realize, however, is their own role in
producing these attacks: By serving as an antithesis to one or more
societal theses, they are essentially not only creating their own work
but also generating their own opposition. An antithesis is, by its
nature, oppositional. Such
work is less likely to generate opposition, and its nature is closer to
that of work representing the products of intelligence: It is adaptive
within existing paradigms, whether in science, literature, art, or
elsewhere. Parents,
teachers, supervisors, and others who appreciate creative work are more
likely to appreciate the forward-incremental type of creativity that
builds on existing ideas than they are to appreciate the redirecting or
reinitiating kinds of creativity that defy existing ideas. On
occasion, though, people become known not for inventing new paradigms
(crowd-defying creativity) but for working extremely well within
existing paradigms. Mozart
would probably be a good example of someone whose creativity was
largely within, rather than in defiance of, existing paradigms. As
pointed out by Pauling (see Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001, this
issue), creative people not only generate a lot of ideas but also
analyze those ideas and discriminate (intelligently) between their
better and their worse ideas. But
beyond intelligence and other abilities, creativity appears to be in
large part a decision (Sternberg, 2000a): Some people use their
intelligence to please the crowd, others to defy it. The
most traditionally intelligent ones hope to lead the crowd not only by
accepting the presuppositions of the crowd but also by analyzing next
steps in thinking and by reaching those next steps before others do
(Sternberg, 1998b).
[article continues] ~ ~ ~ Robert
J. Sternberg is
Director of The Yale Center for the Psychology of Abilities,
Competencies, and Expertise ~ ~ ~ related pages : intensity
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sensitivity GT
Adults giftedness ~ ~ ~
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